Hello from Western Victoria

Hello All from sunny Horsham.

My Condor project car arrived this past week so I thought it was time to introduce myself after a few months of browsing the forum.

How I got to the Condor might be of interest. I was actually selling a Harley Davidson (still for sale if anyone is interested) and had a look on carsales.com.au for a project car that I might have been able to make a good trade on. One search for Ferrari brought up a couple of fibreglass kits including a Condor and a Taipan. I remembered the Condor from my younger days and thought "Why not". The original Ferrari 246GT is my second favorite car of all time and my favorite is the "Spyder" version of the same car. I was hunting one for about 4 months when the one I actually bought came up for sale. It is an unfinished project that has never been registered. It needs a lot of work but is a great place to start.

Here is a picture (hope you like my logo):


The Car has come with a 2.0l Fiat motor which should be okay but I do not actually know if it is a runner yet. Primary priorities for which I will be seeking advice include:

• Lifting the body from the chassis for complete cleanup and preparation
• Complete new suspension, the shocks are fubar
• Probable disk brake conversion

There are also a few potentially major operations to be planned, including:

• Removing a complete section of the roof to create a "Spyder" version
• Possible engine swap to Subaru Turbo

The item that I am looking for right now is a parts source list as in where the non-manufactured parts came from such as mirrors, dash, wipers and the like.

Any advice offered on any of the topics above will be accepted with sincere thanks and I will post specific questions in the forum. I'm really excited.

Dino.

hey mate... i have a condor kit sittin gin my shed also. would be great to see more pics of yours, and exchange any info.

cheers.

Hi twoguns,

Here is a picture of my Condor:



It looks like the six slot in the front of yours are cut out. Mine are solid.

I'm not really sure I have much info to share as the few bits and pieces of info I've scrounged don't seem to match my car to well. I can tell you what I've done though.

Mine came with an earlier Type three chassis so I bought a later type three for the disc brakes and IRS and am completely rebuilding everything from the ground up. I have two rear ends, two front ends and one pan getting sandblasted at the moment. When they are done, a local guy here in country Victoria is going to rebuild the rear end for so that the horns from the early model support the IRS suspension. He will also build a k-frame to support the motor. This person worked for 5 years in Germany at a performance VW business so I am expecting a really great result. I will post some more pictures when its done. I do have a Fiat 2l motor ready to go into the car but there may be small problem. I've just got an engineer on board to help me get the vehicle approved and he might tell me to put the VW 1600 engine in it. Hopefully that gets worked out in the next couple of weeks.

The dash and steering column in my car came out of a fiat. I've actually scrapped the dash and I'm getitng a simple aluminium one made. I purchased all new VDO instruments and lots of odds and end including a set of hydraulic floor mounted pedals that I think will work and look great. I've arranged lots of really odd things like automatic openers for the trunk and engine bay to all the latches and mounts are hidden.

Two things I could really use are: i'd like to find out what my hinges are from. They are sort of spear shapped and mine are pretty rough. I also need another headlight ring and one of mine was lost in transit. Any ideas you might have on these two would be fantastic. I did find a headlight ring off a Morris Minor that has exactly the same profile but it is split and mounts differently.

I have not been able to find suitable mags for the car. It came with a set of jelly bean wheels with spacers to change from VW wide 5 pattern to Holden. But now I am on 4 x 130 pattern. So I found a place in Melbourne that used my exisitng centres, removed the rims and weld in wider rims. $475 for all four wheels. I thought that was pretty good but the wheels do need powder coating and the Yokohama tyres will cost about $300 each. The jelly bean whhels are avaiable with the pacers if you were interested. Also I will have a surplus disc brake front end in many pieces.

I am still debating, but we might end up strengthening the chasis enough to cut the roof off the car and go Spyder. I am quite tall so it is a bit of a squeeze.

That is all I can think of at the moment that is interesting. I hope to be on the round by the end of the year, but we'll see what happens.

Bye for now,

Dino.